November 2017

November 30, 2017

It was lovely to see Saoirse Ronan win the Best Actress Gotham Award for her role as “Lady Bird”/ Christine in Greta Gerwig’s debut film as a director. Especially so, because her mother, who lives in Ireland, was present at Cipriani Wall Street, and Gerwig initially titled the film, “Mothers and Daughters.” I saw the film for a second time at a recent screening at the Crosby Hotel hosted by Candice Bergen and Chloe Malle, mother and daughter. While Gerwig will admit the film hews close to some biographical detail, for example, that it is set in Sacramento, California, and she did in fact attend Catholic school, she veers off in many ways from her own story. Women of her age will surely identify with Ronan’s Lady Bird, her wrongheaded choices in boys, friends, habits like smoking, just about everything.

November 28, 2017

As film celebrations go, Monday’s IFP Gotham Awards was the quintessential New York night with many honored acknowledging their Big Apple core: tributee Dustin Hoffman recalled the days when he first arrived in the city, his recent mention in the news on the list for misconduct, blissfully omitted. With John Cameron Mitchell as M. C., the event at Cipriani Wall Street avoided the politics of the day—sexual harassment, white supremacy, the void in good leadership—focusing, mostly, on the art of cinema. But that does not mean the night lacked political moment as Dan Rather, exemplar of truth to power journalism, presented a humanitarian tribute award to Al Gore who gamely got up to remind everyone of the progress of global warming, and the necessity to face the challenge of our planet now.

November 25, 2017

Alexandra Dean’s documentary, Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story, emphasizes the actress’ contribution to a world outside the shallows of Hollywood. The stunning brunette Hedy Lamarrdefied the illogical adage: if a woman is beautiful surely she can’t have brains too. Then again, few people of any gender have the kind of brains Lamarr had; she was an inventor of a code, a communication system involving randomly operating frequencies, devised to help in the war effort. Who dares to think like that? In the context of our current discourse about sexual harassment, in her time the objectification of women was simply show business as usual. But whip smart, Lamarr managed, escaping a boring marriage in Vienna, finding her way out of Nazi occupied Europe to America aboard a ship on which movie mogul Louis B. Mayerwas also a passenger, and making sure she got his attention. Her beauty took her far.

“I hate the word adaptation,” said Andre Aciman, about, eh, the adaptation of his 2007 novel Call Me By Your Name by James Ivory for the new movie of that title, directed by Luca Guadagnino. Aciman addressed a crowded auditorium of fans at the Library: “They cut this and add that,” he explained, so authors complain, “but I could see that film can do things that cannot be done in a book.”

November 21, 2017

Ever since the movie Get Out opened last February, people have been talking. Is this edgy horror story a vision of blacks’ worst nightmares? Or, are whites more disturbed by the social satire? Comedian/ writer/ director Jordan Peele’s smart movie puts this discourse on the table. For anyone still in the dark, the plot goes like this: Daniel Kaluuya and Allison Williams star as a mixed race couple. William’s Rose, maybe named for Rosemary’s Baby, brings her boyfriend Chris (Kaluuya) to meet the parents, in a country house deep in the woods. Let’s just say, deer crossing the road are not the only casualty. Part Stepford Wives, part Night of the Living Dead, the scariest movie of the year features faces frozen in civility, and the sinister sound of a spoon tapping a teacup.

November 19, 2017

The Oscar winning actress Gloria Grahame was hardly Hollywood royalty, a sulky blond bombshell playing bad girls and good. The movie Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool, directed by Paul McGuigan and based on Peter Turner’s memoir of his affair with the American actress, takes you from her saucy time meeting Turner, a Brit much younger than she, through her final days. The actress Annette Bening, Hollywood royalty for sure, is down to earth; despite critical praise for many glorious performances including last year’s Mike Mills movie, as the matriarch in Twentieth Century Women, she has not yet won an Academy Award. Bening’s Gloria Grahame as an older and wiser version of her character in The Grifters. Last year, her husband Warren Beatty was honored at the Museum of the Moving Image, and she will be feted this year at their gala in December. Is this sublime actress on the road to an Oscar nod at last?

November 17, 2017

In The Band’s Visit, eight members of a police band from Alexandria, Egypt, uniformed in powder blue, peer out from the Ethel Barrymore theater stage looking for their airport bus connection. As in the 2007 movie on which this delightful musical is based, through miscommunications, humorous language blips, the band ends up in the wrong place, in a small town in the Israeli desert and must spend the night. Following the motif of strangers coming to a place and changing it—and themselves-- forever, the play is a picture of diplomacy, with the band’s conductor Tewfiq (Tony Shalhoub) meeting Dina (Katrina Lenk), at the café where she works: “Welcome to Nowhere,” she sings, her ultimate perception of Arab men: Omar Shariff. Tewfiq could be a muted variation, once he takes off his hat.

November 13, 2017

“Brooklyn is in the house,” laughs Spike Lee from the stage of the Paramount during his conversation with Maurice Wallace, a high point of last weekend’s Virginia Film Festival. The security at the historic theater is something akin to that in airports, producing long lines for avid film lovers. Spike Lee, in an astute bit of festival programming, was invited to show his documentary, I Can’t Breathe, an interview with Ramsey Orta who took the cellphone footage of Eric Garner dying at the hands of Staten Island police, screened in a double bill with his 4 Little Girls (1997). Before making a quick turnaround, flying back to Brooklyn for the premiere of his Netflix series, “She’s Gotta Have It,” based on his movie, Lee announced his next project teaming up with Get Out director Jordan Peele to make Black Clansman, starring John David Washington, Denzel’s son in the title role, and Adam Driver as the white man who portrays him in the clan.

November 10, 2017

Guitarist John Pizzarelli and singer Jessica Molaskey are man and wife, and married in music. Headlining the Café Carlyle this week, their act is a sublime mix called “The Little Things You Do Together” after a Stephen Sondheim tune; they perform standards such as Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields’ “A Fine Romance,” a Joni Mitchell favorite, “The Last Time I Saw Richard,” and Sondheim’s classic “Children Will Listen” and “Finishing the Hat.” Jessica sits back as John does “Baubles, Bangles, and Beads,” and then exclaims, “Now you know why we are together for 20 years. He had me at ‘baubles.’” Cute, yes, and their banter works as well onstage as it does on the radio, even when they plug their respective albums, such as her new “Portraits of Joni,” urging your purchase. (They have a kid in college.) Yes, they can sing!

November 07, 2017

At the New York Public Library Lions Gala on Monday night, a Who’s Who of writers --and readers—gathered to celebrate five Tom Brokaw,Michael Chabon,Carla Hayden, Colson Whitehead, and Robert Wilson. The gorgeously refurbished readers’ room on the library’s third floor was transformed into a book-lined palace dining hall, for Norm Lewis performing Cole Porter’s “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” followed by a red ribbon ceremony, “medalling” the literary “lions.” Unlike most events of this nature, few speeches got in the way of the fine dinner and din of lively conversation.